The program known as the Alaska Rural Teacher Training Corps (ARTTC) was established in 1970 as a 4-year experimental program to train Native elementary school teachers for rural Alaskan native communities or for any school in the country where an Alaskan teaching certificate is acceptable. The beginning group included an even distribution of males and females ranging in age from 18 to 48 who are a mixture of 4 distinct native groups. As the program proceeded, it became apparent that it was not going to be simply a matter of applying the latest teacher training techniques. This paper explains the 3 basic questions explored in the program: (1) Why train natives to become teachers? (2) What is a native teacher? and (3) How do you train native teachers? Another area that was investigated is the curriculum: what students were doing, and what they were supposed to learn during their stay in the program. Finally, the paper discusses what participants in this experimental program learned. This evaluation and discussion of the above areas concludes that it is difficult to be a native and a teacher too. The program may not really be training "teachers" since the feed-back from the participants was that they felt more like general practitioners than specialists. Also, literature in education, as well as anthropology, is often of limited use in the program. (FF)